Integralism

So we covered that and touched on eschatology.

Yeah, and then we had you back on to discuss Integralism, which was one of my favorite episodes, man.

It was just like we had you and TLM Ryan on that episode, and we went over all the stuff.

What the hell is that?

Not everyone understood it.

Integrist circles contested that day, that'd be the trads, even making it one of the reasons for a schismatic rupture.

Others feared syncretism or relativism as they still do today, he said.

About two years later, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre would consecrate bishops, earning a supposed excommunication for himself and the bishops.

I mean, the fascinating thing about the Trump administration is that it's this kind of hodgepodge, it's this very uncomfortable alliance.

You have, you know, venture capitalists and technologists on the one hand who are allied with this kind of these religious groups Integralists and others, Evangelicals too.

And so it's a very uncomfortable mix, and the two sides are very suspicious of each other.

But the balance of that may well change if Vance becomes the heir apparent.

Subsequent events such as the European Enlightenment and pursuing facts by evidence through scientific research over godly beliefs and the French Revolution in the 18th century dismantled Catholicism in France and more widely placed human agency over religious belief for being socially, culturally and politically responsible for actions.

The revival of integralism began in the 1960s and today the Josiahs locate the demise of spiritual authority to the emergence of liberalism that began in the 18th century.

And here's what they say, and I quote, Integralism rejects liberalism as well as various modern ideologies of totalitarianism, whether fascist or socialist.

Rather, it is a tradition and Thomistic political theory based around natural law and the virtues, the family and subsidiarity, friendship, solidarity and the common good.

Now, Thomistic political theory is based on the writings of Thomas Aquinas who died in 1274, one year before the birth of Marsilius in 1275.

Again, the revolutionaries who want to tear down the entire system.

So a group from the right, the so-called Catholic Integralists.

Again, the entire idea here is there was some historical juncture at which the entire thing went haywire and sideways.

So this is a fairly small group of intellectuals who argue that basically the West went wrong with the end of the Holy Roman Empire.

And so the chief goal of all these radicals on all sides of the aisle is demoralization.

So Bernie Sanders tells us we're all poor and suffering victims of the supposed billionaires and millionaires, and that the solution to all of that is a centralized government redistribution.

Catholic integralists will tell us we live in a godless, unrooted society, isolated and atomistic, and the reason for that is capitalism, and the only cure is that we should get rid of the liberal principles of the Declaration and the Constitution and return to a sort of new Holy Roman Empire and listen to the Pope and Rerum novarum.

The Tuckers of the world argue we live in an overrun, impoverished, spiritually barren society.

Adrian Vermeule, who's at Harvard University, he's going to have a huge influence.

is advocating what he calls Catholic Integralism, or the subordination of the state to the authority of the Roman Catholic Church.

He's going to, of course, ban abortion, pornography.

He's argued that atheists should not be allowed to hold office and that Catholic immigrants should be given priority.

so integralism in its original form was a sort of 19th and early 20th century political theology that suggested that basically the church needed to have ultimate authority even over secular rulers, right? So the church's authority had to be recognized as higher than secular rulers.

And it calls for basically a closer relationship between church and state than what we've ever seen as normal in America.

Integralism has a kind of unhappy history because self-described integralists ended up tacking a lot into fascist movements.

There's a reason we stopped calling ourselves integralists.

It was very anti-liberal, but in ways that went pretty badly in the early 20th century.